The comic dramatist NF Simpson, who has died at the ripe old age of 92, was often compared with Eugène Ionesco. But I always thought he belonged to a deeply English tradition of word-spinning, logic-twisting absurdity. Simpson's real ancestors were Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and the Goons. His legatees were Peter Cook, the Monty Python gang and the Goodies. But beneath Simpson's apparent whimsy lay a consistent point of view. It was clearly articulated in his final play, If So, Then Yes, shown only last year. What it amounted to was that we live in a patently ridiculous world for which neither religion nor reason can provide an explanation. You didn't have to buy that to find Simpson blissfully funny.

Many people forget that Simpson emerged from the Royal Court in the late 1950s, when it was supposedly supplying an endless diet of kitchen-sink drama. Apparently out of nowhere – though he was actually an extramural lecturer – came "Wally" Simpson with his hilariously droll, subversively satirical plays. In A Resounding Tinkle (1956) a suburban couple called the Paradocks are asked to form a government by someone "working through the street directory". In The Hole (1958) a group of people gather round a gaping cavity in the road and all try to impose their vision of what is happening on others. And in One Way Pendulum a legal obsessive, whose spare-time reading includes Perjury for Pleasure and Teach Yourself Torts, builds a full-scale replica of the Old Bailey in his living room.

For a long time, Simpson seemed to disappear almost entirely from view, though I was sorry to miss an episode he wrote for the 70s ITV series Crown Court, called An Upward Fall. But he reappeared triumphantly last year, at the age of 91. The framework was that of an octogenarian dictating his memoirs in an upmarket retirement home. But it was one that allowed for copious interruptions. I especially enjoyed the animal-fixated housekeeper who claimed to have heard that the serpent in the garden of Eden was actually a very long, thin dachshund. And how can one forget that, according to Simpson, it was Sartre's excellent teeth that tipped the scales in winning him the Nobel prize in 1964?

Behind the playfulness lay a philosopher who asked us to accept the irrationality of the universe. But I am wary of being too po-faced about a writer who loved to make fun of the intellectual habit of pigeon-holing. At the end of A Resounding Tinkle, Simpson provides a brilliant parody of a BBC radio programme in which critics solemnly discuss whether the play they have just seen is a hotchpotch or a gallimaufry. Let's just say that Simpson was one of the funniest dramatists to have emerged in the past 60 years, and one who belonged in a deeply English tradition.